


Companion Pieces

by ChronicallyOwlish



Category: Andromeda (TV)
Genre: Companion Piece, F/M, Fluff, Original Character(s), short story collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-03-31 16:31:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13979094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChronicallyOwlish/pseuds/ChronicallyOwlish
Summary: Sometimes your characters want to keep playing on the sidelines of the plot, so this is a collection of short stories, drabbles, and flash fiction that exist within the universe of Welcome the Dawn.





	1. Breathtaking

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set sometimes after the end of part one and before the beginning of part two of Welcome the Dawn. I've done it in the point of view of my original character, Olivia (Ollie) Lange so I can practice her a little bit more. I was in a bad mood and wanted to write something to cheer me up, and this totally did the trick.
> 
> Enjoy

The ocean is much bigger than she thought it’d be. It stretches on and on, an unbroken plate of sparkling purple glass until it hits the sky. Not a single cloud marrs the sky’s perfect blue and the sun is bright and warm. It smiles down on them, the golden sand catching its rays and reflecting them back so that the sand shimmers and Ollie imagines she’s stumbled on the infinite riches of a storybook king. For the first time in her life, she understands the word ‘breathtaking’.

“This used to be one of the most sought-after vacation spots on Tarn Vedra before the Fall of the Commonwealth. The sky used to be full of gulls with beautiful blue and green feathers and you could hear their calls from kilometers away. In the early mornings, before the crowds arrived, the entire shoreline was dotted with colorful shells and bits of sea glass. People used to wake up with the sun just so they could collect them before the crowds arrived,” Trance explains as if she’d been there herself, which is impossible, but Trance is like that Ollie’s learned. She’s hard to place.

A hand falls on her shoulder. From the corner of her eye she can see Harper, dressed in the same ridiculous skin-tight getup he’d insisted she wear. A wetsuit, he’d called it. When she’d asked him why they didn’t just wear bathing suits like she saw in surfing videos he’d mentioned something about sand-burn and hypothermia, which both sounded awful, so she’d put it on despite the risk her neighborhood friends might see. At least its accents are red. A bright red that stands out against the black of the rest of the suit. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Glad your dad let you out of his sight for the afternoon.”

“Only because he thinks you and Trance will keep me out of trouble. He likes you guys.”

It’s hard not to like the people who’d rescued your entire family from a doomed life of servitude on a slave planet and miraculously brought your son back from the brink of death. The people who’d given you a new life on a new world and never asked for anything in return. Even so, when Harper had taken a single offhand comment that she’d never been to the beach and turned it into a plan, her dad had struggled with letting her go. In the end, he’d conceded that he couldn’t think of anyone else in the Universe she’d be safer with, even if they were whisking her off to the opposite hemisphere.

It meant everything.

Truth is, her dad is trying hard to be gentler, to let her make her own choices, and to not hold mistakes against her. The few months they’ve lived away from the ghetto have changed all of them, but her father most of all. But it’s hard for him and she really, really should say something but has no idea what, so she stays quiet. One day the words will come. Maybe.

Harper squeezes her shoulder. “Come on, let’s get closer.”

Sand is made from ground down rocks, shells, and bits of other hard things, so it surprises her how soft and smooth it is as it squishes between her bare toes. The top of it is almost too hot to step on, yet as her feet sink in, it cools the soles of her feet. The contrast is so fascinating that she isn’t even annoyed at how much harder it is to walk on this ever-shifting surface, though she feels all clumsy and gangly. She’s glad Trance and Harper are carrying the bags.

Wind blows off the ocean, growing stronger as they move closer, carrying with it the roaring of the waves as they crash against the shore and a spray of salt she can actually taste.

“One day, this place will be alive again,” Trance says, and Ollie looks over to her. Her brother thinks she’s a fairy princess pretending to be a mortal. Jake’s always had an overactive imagination, but for a moment Ollie takes herself out of the world of facts she exists in, especially since starting courses at the All Systems University on Xinti—lessons in a half a dozen subjects arriving daily for her and a handful of other ‘promising young minds’ in Seefra City—and considers he might be right. 

Even in her green accented wetsuit with her long hair bound tightly to the nape of her neck in a woven bun and a large black bag hanging from one shoulder and a rolling cooler clutched in the other hand, she looks like a storybook character. Her skin shines almost and brightly as the ocean as if the sun’s rays are wrapping themselves around her and clinging to her skin. As Ollie watches, Trance stops, lifts her chin to the sky, and closes her eyes, a peaceful smile on her face.

_ “I don’t know how they keep her cooped up on the Andromeda. It’s impossible to keep that woman indoors,” _ her father had said yesterday when Trance showed up with her arms wrapped around a flat of seedlings she’d brought for their garden and disappeared into the backyard almost as soon as they’d said hello, Jake trailing her like a shadow. Ollie secretly wonders the same because in moments like these it seems like Trance is meant to exist as part of nature, not an observer of it like the rest of them. She’s never met anyone like that before.

The people of New Burke are hard. They are like the rocks this sand is made from. She belongs to a world of greys and brown, of rough edges, and broken things while Trance belongs to a world in full color. She belongs to a place where birds sing and trees reach for the bright blue sky. A fairytale world. Ollie stops too, her toes brushing up against the place where the wet sand forms a line against the dry. She gazes off to the horizon, a thin line impossibly far away. “I can’t see how it can be any more beautiful than this.”

Harper comes up beside her and drops the long, awkward bag he’d carried out here from the drop pod and a slightly shorter bag, both flat. “It was hard for me to believe, too, the first time I saw the ocean on Infinity Atol. Can you imagine that? Earth is–was 71% water and the first time I saw the ocean was when I looked down on it from the Maru.” The smile on his face is a lie because there is too much sadness in his voice for it to be real. His automatic correction squeezes her heart. New Burke wasn’t a great place to live, but she still misses it. It was all she’d ever know and where all her friends and family were from, and she can’t fathom it not existing anymore. 

After dropping her bag into the sand, Trance moves over to Harper’s other side with her fingers stretching out until they brush his. He takes her hand and she squeezes. An entire conversation happens without a word being spoken, and Ollie can remember hundreds of moments just like this between her mother and father over the years. “You ready to teach me how to surf?”

Excitement replaces sadness. “I’ve been waiting  _ years _ for you to agree to this.”

And Ollie gets what Trance has done. Memories of her life in the ghetto are like an electrical current running wild—hard to control once they are set free. She’s learned that she has to ground herself in the present so the past stops shocking her. When her mother overheard her explaining this Jake after another nightmare had stolen sleep from him, she’d taken her in her comforting arms and whispered,  _ “I wish you hadn’t had to grow up so fast.” _

Ollie wishes the same.

She wishes she could sympathize with the problems of her friends, whose lives on Seefra hadn't been easy, but couldn’t compare to hers on New Burke. She wishes she could learn to let go—that she could finally be free from the Dragons. Ollie takes a deep breath and shakes it off. Even Seamus Harper, the man who sparked a fire that spread a revolution to every Dragon slave planet in the Tri-Galaxies isn’t free from the Dragons. But he lives. He lives in the moment in a way she wants to learn. So she turned her attention back to her friends.

“I still don’t think this is a great idea, but I’m willing to give it a try,” Trance says with a glance at the ocean, her smile waning.

He kisses her forehead. “You’ll be fine. You know how to move because we’ve been practicing and you’ve ridden out into the ocean on my board before, so you know what it feels like. You just need to try it now. Besides, you’re pretty good on the hoverboard and you killed it when we went snowboarding on Trion III.”

Trance doesn’t look convinced at all. If anything, she’s more reluctant now. “Things were different then.” And she sounds as sad as Harper did a moment ago, only Ollie doesn’t know why but understands that there is something in Trance’s past, too.

Harper knows what’s bothering her and pulls her into a tight hug. “I know, Babe, but you’re stronger than you think you are, and this’ll be fun. I won’t let anything happen to you—I promise..”

With a still-nervous smile and a quick nod, the conversation is over. 

Now he stoops beside the long bag, opens it up and pulls out an oblong board in two shades of orange with three small fins on one end. The infamous surfboard. From the other bag, he pulls out a bright red board that’s shorter and wider than the surfboard, and its color draws Ollie forward. A boogie board in her favorite color, different than the one he’d brought by for her to practice with last night and she knows now why he asked for her favorite color two weeks ago.

Harper holds it out to her. “This is yours to keep because I have a feeling that after today you’re gonna wanna come to the beach all the time. I’ll get the boys their own once it’s summer on your side of the planet.”

It’s lighter than it looks. She marvels at her name engraved and painted black in curving letters along the top and wonders what sort of dream she’s having where people just give her brand new things to keep all to herself.

“You ready?” Trance asks in her soft voice, pulling Ollie back to this place that can’t actually be reality.

There is a nervous sort of energy building inside because she’s never gone swimming before. She’s never set foot in a body of water any larger than a bathtub. Harper swore to her last night that her wetsuit would keep her afloat, that Trance isn’t a strong swimmer and wouldn’t even agree to this for either of them without that assurance. Yet, as much as she loves technology and is amazed every day with what it can do without the Dragons regulating it, she has a hard time imagining how it can protect her from the power of the vast ocean with waves half her height cresting a few meters offshore. She bounces on her feet now, unable to stop herself from moving.

It isn’t like she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. She’s spent the last three weeks researching and analyzing video after video, reading up on the benefits of different board sizes and shapes, and making note of the benefits and challenges of different forms. Jace called it overkill, but she likes to know these things. And last night, Harper had physically demonstrated the basics and had her practice them so they could get right to it today. She was as ready as she was ever going to be.

“Yeah, I think I am.”  _ Or not _ her stomach says with a half-hearted flutter. But she’s already crossed the stars and is standing on a beach on the Tarn Vedra of legend—even if it’s a little worse for wear—so she’ll be damned if a little water is gonna stop her in her tracks.

Harper picks up the longboard he and Trance will be sharing then nods to her board. “Strap that to yourself, and let’s go.”

A few steps in she shrieks and stops as a wave rolls onto the shore and pools around her feet. The water’s cold. Really cold. It starts to pull away almost as soon as it hits and she’s struck with the strangest sensation like the entire world is moving around her. Beneath her feet, the sand pulls away, tickling her soles until the water is gone and she is left standing in a depression that wasn’t there before. Once again, she is breathless, staring wide-eyed at the horizon with her mouth hanging open.

“It’s cold,” she says a moment later with a laugh because Harper and Trance are watching.

“You’ll get used to it, but you can also press the button on your wetsuit collar, next to the camera, to turn up the heat. Speaking of which, these babies are capable of taking holographic video, so you can wow the family in 3D tonight.”

They waded deeper, the waves steadily moving higher, until they reached the first line of curling waves at waist level. Harper calls it the first break. The boogie board wanted to take off on her, so she holds it above her head. The water pushes at her from the top and pulls from the bottom, like a wet tug-of-war and it’s like nothing she’s ever felt before.

“I feel like it’s trying to pull me in,” she says, raising her voice to be heard. Trance and Harper are obviously used to the push and pull of the water. Either that or Trance has more natural balance and grace than Ollie will ever have. As if to prove a point, Ollie stumbles, falling into the water as it pulls back into the ocean. There is salt on her lips and for a moment all her senses are consumed by the roar of the ocean and the tickle of foam fizzing around her ears. Her back scrapes against the sandy bottom and she is grateful for the wetsuit because out here the sand isn’t smooth against her hands. It scrapes at them. The water is rudely trying to invade her nostrils as she breathes and it stings.

Harper’s got her, his grip strong and tight, as he hauls her back to her feet again. “And that would be the undertow. You get used to that, too. This is where we’re going to stop anyway. We’re not going anywhere just yet, but I want you two on your boards. I want you to feel the waves as they pass so you know when they are catching your board.”

He doesn’t stop to ask if she’s alright. Doesn’t even give her a chance to be afraid or have second thoughts. Out here his joking manner is tucked away and he’s all business.

With her chest pressed to the board and her fingers digging into its foam sides, she kicks up her legs, letting the board hold her weight, giving herself to the water and trusting that after going through all the trouble to save her life on New Burke, he’ll keep her safe out here. He keeps a tight grip on the end so she doesn’t take off. 

At first, all is calm, her body gently swaying, her eyes catching the black of their bags on the empty shore, and the glint of their drop pod even further back. Then she is rising up to meet the sky, and just as she’s starting to believe she’s discovered what flying must feel like, everything dips again with her stomach lagging behind. Water sprays around her, droplets catching the sun before landing on her head, and the entire world is encapsulated in a single moment.

“Whoo!” The shout is drowned out by another wave almost as soon as it’s out, and her board catches again. There is a smile on her face almost as big as the one she’d worn when the Andromeda exited slipstream and Tarn Vedra filled the viewport.

“You feel it?” Harper asks, and he’s excited too. Ollie looks over and Trance is laying with her belly on the board beaming at them both.

“Yeah, I feel it.”

“Good, because now I want you to dig your feet into the sand, crouch down, and press the board to your chest like we practiced last night. When you feel the wave catch, jump, hold on tight, and go.”

Feet in the sand again, she looks to the shore, and it seems so far away. “What if I fall?” She only understands swimming on an academic level and is suddenly afraid of the water, even at this shallow depth.

“You will. We’re all gonna fall lots of times. Just push the board forward and roll.” He then turns to Trance, “When you feel the wave catch, pop up, just like we practiced. I’ll swim behind.”

There isn’t any more time to listen. She feels the wave, this one larger than the last few, catch her board and decides there is no time like the present and jumps. Once again, she meets the sky, and she really is flying now. Flying, and screaming, and laughing as the wave breaks into a white foam all around her and the shoreline rushes ever closer until her board hits the sand and she rolls off of it, the impact taking her breath away.

After she’s regained her feet she looks out and sees Trance popping up to her feet on the board and riding for a moment before she loses control and plunges into the water. When she pops out of the water, she’s laughing, though it is a ghost of a sound with the crashing waves. Ollie is ready for more and runs back into the waves.

Over and over she flies and as the sun climbs to its zenith and slowly begins its descent, the tide grows higher, as if nature too is watching and has deemed her ready for a greater challenge. As the waves get larger, Harper teaches her how to ride along the edge so she keeps going longer. Then he tries to teach her how to flip. It’s amazing how he cuts through the wave and uses its own curl to flip himself over with the boogie board hugged tightly to his torso and lands in just the right position to keep going, but when she tries she ends up with a mouth full of sea water and a sore shoulder from bumping along the bottom of the ocean as the wave rolls her to the shore and deposits her there. She supposes she should thank it for being kind enough to leave her on land instead of carrying her further out to sea.

Still, she goes back for more, until she is exhausted and there is a sort of halo around her vision making everything seem more like a dream.

There is sand in her hair, ears, and even her teeth. Her hands are raw. Everything tastes of salt and smells of the sea. She’s sore and tired, and her throat is raw from screaming and laughing. The sun’s warmth feels like a big fluffy blanket wrapped comfortably around her. It’s time for a break, she decides. 

It seems like it's been hours since they’d first laid out the giant, heavy, picnic blanket and opened the cooler stuffed full of food and drinks. They’d eaten their fill not once, but twice already, and there is still more left. All of this for a single day out. It baffles and amazes her. She grabs a Sparky Cola with its sweet bubbles and sits on the edge of the blanket with her toes in the sand, wiggling them so she can feel the way it moves.

Trance has long since mastered riding the waves on Harper’s board, all the practice he’d alluded to earlier paying off. Now he’s teaching her how to surf with both of them on the board. For all of her reluctance before, she’s fearless now, braving waves much taller than the both of them. Ollie watches as they paddle out over and over, each time failing spectacularly, flying off the board in every direction. Even if he keeps his balance after Trance has fallen, he jumps off and finds her, always holding on like he’s afraid of losing her in that deep blue ocean.

And that is the kind of world she is in now, she realizes as she lays back, eyes focusing on the moon’s outline, the only thing visible in the late afternoon sky. A world where she can face her fears and if she falls, someone will be there to lift her up and support her while she tries again. A world where she doesn’t need to fear to learn something new, or spending a day having fun. Hers is no longer a colorless world. It is a world of golden sands and purple oceans. Of bright blue skies and red surfboards. A world of endless colors and endless possibilities.

For the hundredth time in a single day, she understands the word ‘breathtaking’.


	2. Fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes the past comes back to haunt you. OCtober prompt from the /r/fanfiction Reddit. Prompt: A random TV trope. In this case "Walked into a Door"

“Hey—Hey! What the hell, Ollie?” Harper asked as he grabbed her by the arm. When she tried to get away, he looped his other arm just beneath the neck and held her tight against his chest. She struggled, but while he had a few centimeters on him vertically, he was a lot stronger than he looked. Still, his muscles worked hard as she pitted herself against them, straining and stomping, until her brain caught up and she went limp, gasping for air. Across from her, Doyle held tight to a Nietzschean boy maybe a year or two older than Ollie, his face contorted, veins bulging from his over-large forehead. Blood dripped from his nose and brown pasta sauce from his hair. The plate she’d dumped over his head lay broken at his feet. Hatred, like an inferno, burned inside her chest. His nose was still on too straight. Could do with another fist to it. Bet he hadn’t expected a female kludge to hit so hard. Joke was on him. The ghetto made her strong.

“Can I let you go?” Harper asked.

She nodded and he loosened his grip enough for her to spring like a race-horse towards her foe.

“Yeah, didn’t think that was gonna work.” Harper grabbed her by the shoulders, fingers digging painfully into her muscles and forced her down into a chair while Doyle escorted the boy out of the bar. He sighed heavily, and for a second he reminded her of her dad. “Cool it. This is my bar you’re destroying.”

The pressure remained on her shoulders until Doyle returned, not even winded from the effort. Must be nice to be an android without all the squishy bits. Her jaw ached worse than when she’d had her wisdom teeth pulled at thirteen and iron filled her mouth. The foggy tunnel vision cleared and her surroundings came into focus. A few overturned chairs. Broken glass on the ground. The air reeked of sharp alcohol—the kind her mother used in the ghetto to relieve pain and disinfect wounds. The kind that burned going down and singed the nostrils to sniff. Some patrons stood around openly staring while others stared down their glasses as if they were crystal balls with the reason for life contained within. Doyle looked her over, expression unreadable, and disappeared into the back room. 

Ollie’s anger seeped away like boiling water from a broken kettle, leaving behind nothing but steam. She risked a look at Harper. Not angry—that was a surprise. She’d be peeved, at the very least, if she’d offered someone a job cleaning off tables and serving food and instead they picked a fight and destroyed her property. Instead, he studied her like one of his broken machines, searching for the malfunction.

“Sorry,” she muttered because the bar was quieter than it’d ever been before and it felt like something should be said.

“Come on, let’s go to the back and have a little chat while Doyle gets the med kit together.” At least it didn’t sound like she was fired. That was something. This job afforded her more independence than she’d ever had before and she was grateful for it.

Chatter picked up as soon as she stood and her ears burned as she caught snippets of their conversation. One woman thought she was a lunatic. Not far from the truth—whatever demon that’d taken up residence in her brain had fled now, leaving only Ollie behind, and Ollie couldn’t believe what a mess of things she’d made. She was smarter than this.

“You know, I see way too much of myself in you sometimes,” he said as they passed behind the bar into a combination storeroom, lab, and lounge.

Ollie smiled and winced because it hurt like hell. “There are worst people to be like.”

“You don’t want to be like me. You’re smarter than that.” He waved behind him. “I didn’t just decide to remodel the bar for the hell of it. I did it because I decided a Lupin pride asshole with two goons needed his face rearranged. Destroyed the place and almost got myself killed in the process. At least you decided to pick a fight when I was here to stop you.”

At a beaten-up old table, one of the originals from before the bar’s remodel, Doyle laid out a few medical tools. Ollie took a seat, studying them as she did everything new here in the free world.

“What did he do?”

“Insulted the food.” It was a petulant answer not fit to give people who cared about her and only wanted to help. Still didn’t stop her. Talking hurt. Everything hurt with the throb from her jaw turning into a pounding piston inside her skull and her lunch sitting heavy in her stomach after that Nietzschean asshat shoved his knee into it.

Doyle raised an eyebrow and gave Harper the kind of smile grown-ups used when they thought children were being silly. Glad she could amuse.

“While I appreciate your loyalty to this fine establishment, I don’t believe you.”

Seventeen and heading off to college in a few months, she should be beyond pouting like her little brother, but it came out anyway. Doyle picked up and instrument and scanned her with it, eyes on the readout. She picked up another cylindrical device and held it up to Ollie’s jaw. There was the strangest sensation of something moving beneath her skin. Kind of itchy, really. Then the pain subsided some.

“Okay, fine. He called me a ‘nice little kludge’ and asked me to show him some love. So I did.”

Harper’s face turned a few different shades of red and his lips curled in disgust but he took a deep breath and the color in his face evened out some. The sneer remained.

“Next time, tell me and I’ll kick him out.” Harper took a walk around the room and Ollie followed him while Doyle worked on her. After two circuits of the room, he stopped beside her again, calmer. “You can’t go starting fights with Nietzscheans who insult you. It’s gonna take time for them to catch up to the new way of things and it’s too big a war to wage with your fists.”

Now he sounded like his girlfriend. Maybe that’s what relationships did to you.

Doyle held up an injector. “Nanobots to take care of the pain a bit and keep the healing going. Your jaw was fractured—not badly, but it’s going to bruise.”

“Your mom’s never going to let you come back here,” Harper said, frowning.

Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

Her eyes widened and she shook her head. It didn’t hurt quite as much anymore, thanks to Doyle. “You think I’m going to tell her?” she asked, “I’ll say I walked into a door or something.”

“Good luck with that. I’ve tried that excuse and it’s never worked,” Harper said, shaking his head, but smiling a little.

Exhaustion fell over her. All of this time away from the ghetto—all the wonderful things that had happened to her since the Andromeda crew took her away—and it still haunted her. It followed her everywhere. A Nietzschean asshole here. A nightmare there. Momentary lapses in judgment when fight or flight shut down her brain.

“Does it ever get easier?” she asked and swallowed down the knot that formed in her throat. “Does the past ever shut up?”

Harper pulled out a chair and sat across from her, expression serious. He took her hands and squeezed. He didn’t speak about his life on in the Boston ghetto often but he didn’t have to. He’d have frozen and starved through the winters. The Dragons would have taken his loved ones one by one. Beaten him. Pushed him down. Denied him the chance to be himself—just like her. Two different worlds, light years apart, but a grim shared history.

“It takes a long time, and it’s impossible to do it alone, but over time you learn.” He squeezed again. “You learn.”

She sure hoped he was right.


End file.
